Джон Коннолли - The Dirty South

Ava rose to clear the plates and get some ice cream for dessert. Both Parker and her husband offered to help, but she shooed them away.

‘I don’t require either of you to be under my feet,’ she said. ‘Evan can do the dishes later.’

Griffin and Parker went out to the back porch to get some air. Parker made sure Ava was out of earshot before speaking again.

‘Why didn’t you tell me about your first wife before now?’ he said.

‘I never saw a justification for it,’ Griffin replied. ‘And what would I have said: that I’d lost someone too, that I knew how you felt? It wouldn’t have been true. We may both have suffered bereavement, but our experience of it is not the same.’

‘I’m surprised nobody else chose to share it with me discreetly.’

‘You’re a stranger, and even my own officers would have left it for me to tell you. They wouldn’t have considered it their part to do so.’

‘That’s commendable,’ said Parker. ‘I notice you wear a cross.’

It was silver, and very plain. Griffin touched a hand to it.

‘I still have my faith. You?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘I had to reach an accommodation with it,’ said Griffin. ‘With God, too. I decided it wasn’t part of His plan for my wife to drown. Anyone that said otherwise was deluded.’

‘What, then?’

‘Who can say? Maybe God is old, and His attention wanders; or He has so much to take care of, what with famine, floods and war, and people trying to kill one another on a minute-to-minute basis, that small occurrences, like a woman struggling in a lake, sometimes slip through His fingers.’

‘I’ve yet to reach that stage of reasoning,’ said Parker.

‘I can believe it. And, you know, I may be wrong about everything. Ultimately, this is a being that allowed His own son to be nailed to a tree. Callousness may be endemic to Him. If that’s the case, I choose not to consider myself made in His image, and I reject His disorder. For the most part, though, I think He spends His days just fighting off despair, like the rest of us.’

Griffin reached into his shirt pocket and handed Parker a folded sheet of paper. Parker opened it to reveal the mug shot of a man, with features that were almost familiar.

‘That’s Hollis Ward,’ said Griffin.

Hollis Ward resembled his son gone to seed, the face bloated, the skin marked by broken veins and patches of redness that could have been the result of dermatitis or eczema. His eyes were too small for his head, and darkly belligerent. Even had Parker not been aware of Ward’s history, he would have identified this man as one mired in degradation.

‘When are you going to put this out?’ he said.

‘We had planned to do it this afternoon, but events have conspired to delay any approaches to the media.’

‘Rhinehart’s death?’

‘And a call from Jurel Cade, backed up by one from Pappy. We’ve been asked to hold off on alerting the public to the possibility of Hollis’s involvement.’

‘Why?’

‘Jurel claims to have a lead, although he declined to elaborate, he and I having parted on bad terms earlier today. He said he didn’t want to alert Hollis Ward to the fact that we’re searching for him, which makes some sense. Even had I disagreed, Pappy has made it clear that his newspapers won’t cooperate with us unless Jurel gives them the go-ahead.’

‘What will happen when Jurel becomes sheriff?’ asked Parker. ‘Because I assume that’s part of the family plan.’

‘Jurel will take over from Swanigan after next year’s election, barring a calamity,’ said Griffin. ‘When that happens, I’ll consider early retirement. But Pappy’s aspirations for Jurel go further than his becoming county sheriff. He’d like to see Jurel up in Little Rock, with a ringside seat in the General Assembly. In that case, I won’t just retire, I’ll leave the state. And if Jurel makes it as far as Washington, I’ll emigrate.’

Ava came out with the ice cream and a bowl of strawberries to add to it.

‘Why does Jurel hate the Wards so much?’ asked Parker, as they ate.

‘People here have extensive, if selective, memories,’ said Griffin. ‘I know families that have been feuding for so long that the original offense has been forgotten, and now all that remains is the feud itself. With Jurel, it seems to me it’s Hollis he despises, and Tilon suffers the blowback because he’s Hollis’s son. We all suspected Tilon of being involved in the meth trade, but no one could ever nail him. Kovas won’t want narcotics being an issue for contractors or its own staff, so it’s in the interest of the Cades to put an end to whatever is coming out of the Ouachita. But Jurel also has a sense of right and wrong, however warped I may sometimes consider it to be. He doesn’t like meth being produced in Burdon County. He considers it a personal affront.’

‘And how do you feel about it?’

‘I don’t want meth being cooked or dealt in the county either, but my people were right when they said that I’d always liked Tilon Ward. They just didn’t elaborate on why. Embeth drowned because of a cramp. Dumbest damn thing. She was swimming with friends and stayed out in the water when they returned to the jetty. Boats were going by, and music was playing on the bank, people shouting and laughing, so when Embeth got into difficulties, no one could hear her cries. Tilon was the only one who saw she was in trouble, and he swam out to help her. By then she’d already gone under, but he dove down to get her, brought her back up, and swam with her to shore. There was a nurse in Embeth’s group who tried to resuscitate her, but it was too late. So yes, I admit to a greater tolerance than is wise for Tilon Ward’s flaws, suspected or proven, and it would have pained me to see him go to jail before now, because I’d always hoped he’d see sense and find a new path to follow. But if he had anything to do with Donna Lee’s death, I’ll hold him down myself while they put the needle in his vein.’

Which brought an end to that particular conversation. They watched clouds scud across the moon, and listened to the cries of night birds, before Ava sent Griffin inside to do the dishes, leaving her and Parker to finish their coffee together on the porch.

‘I’m going to have a baby,’ said Ava.

‘I’m pleased for you both.’

‘Thank you. Evan wasn’t sure that we should tell you.’

‘I’ve decided,’ said Parker, ‘that secrecy may be ingrained in this county.’

‘I won’t argue the point, but in our case Evan was worried that the news might compound your own sense of loss. I think he’s spent lot of time since your arrival contemplating what happened to your wife and daughter, and more so after he learned he was going to have a child of his own. It’ll sound strange, but it’s almost as though he feels the need to do something about what befell you, even though there’s nothing that can be done, is there?’

‘Not too much,’ said Parker, which wasn’t the same thing, and she noticed the distinction.

‘I don’t know you very well,’ she said, ‘so I’m reluctant to speak out of turn.’

‘Please, don’t be.’

‘You’re a victim as well. What your wife and little girl endured was horrific, but it’s over now. Your torment goes on.’

She wasn’t looking at him, and it was instead as though she were carefully choosing her words from an array that only she could see, plucking each one from the darkness.

‘I sensed it when they died,’ said Parker. ‘I felt them being torn from me.’

The ground shifted under Ava’s feet, and the landscape tilted. She had buried her mother a year before. That death had come far too soon – a heart attack when her mother was barely into her sixties – but it was not like this. The magnitude of the visitor’s suffering was incomprehensible to her.